“The veteran Scrobblers [Last.fm users] amongst you will probably remember our ‘moderation system’ – this was a user-voting system that let you propose and merge artists, ultimately fixing misspelled artists by creating aliases to the correct version. We are planning to bring this back in a big way, addressing not only artists, but albums and tracks too. … Phase 1 is now underway with the first public ‘beta’ release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint.” On using a system other than Musicbrainz; “The jist will be that although we will use a different fingerprint system, it will still be possible to use it to resolve MBIDs, and once we’ve cleaned up our metadata a bit, we will endeavour to match our catalogue with Musicbrainz. Matching our catalogue to MB atm is hard, because it is so messy.” plus “Just because the guys at MusicIP gave MusicBrainz a free license doesn’t mean that Last.fm (as a paying MB licensee) is obliged to use them too (for more money).” link

“IDG in Sweden is reporting the contents of a leaked Microsoft memo sent to Microsoft partners there, telling them to join the Swedish Institute of Standards and vote yes on OOXML [the Microsoft alternative to ODF]. As you know, 20+ newly registered Microsoft partner companies did so, thus switching the expected No vote to Yes at the last minute. It says Microsoft’s representative Klas Hammar acknowledges the memo was sent, but says it should not have been. …the IBM representative left prior to the vote in protest. An SIS representative defends the process, saying it’s tactical, not against the rules. He acknowledges that the rules might need to be changed.” link

“iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people’s to guess what you’ll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.” link